Monthly Archives: March 2016

After our previous post on occupations, we have discovered that divorce rate in the workforce is a widely-discussed topic on the Internet. In addition, we learned that readers might be interested in more detailed (but simpler) results featuring exact occupations that have outstanding divorce rates. The most recent study of this matter appears to be in an article by S. McCoy and M. Aamodt titled “A Comparison of Law Enforcement Divorce Rates with Those of Other Occupations.” The authors used Census data from the year 2000 ACS and as the name of the paper suggests, it covers all occupations, not specifically Law Enforcement. We will attempt to repeat similar calculations based on modern ACS PUMS data to see how the occupations with the highest divorce rates changed.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau Survey of construction, most new houses were built with central air conditioning in recent years. Just 8 percent of all homes completed in 2014 lacked it (and the preliminary 2015 data suggests an even smaller number: only 6 percent).

In 2003, 70 percent of all new houses completed in the United States used gas as the primary heating fuel, according to the Census Bureau Survey of Construction. This number is down to less than 58 percent as of 2014. In this post, we take a closer look at the data to see if there is any apparent reason for the decrease.

In this post we will investigate if people tend to relocate to areas with higher public transport usage. For this purpose we will combine the data from IRS on relocations within the U.S. and ACS PUMS data estimate of the number of people who use public transport. With ongoing trends of urbanization and globalization we expect to see more people moving to big cities with wider public transport coverage.

If you look around, you will probably notice that most homes have two-car garages. Actually, according to statistics, more than half of all new homes sold have parking facilities for exactly two cars. And even more than that, their percentage doesn’t change much with time – so it seems to be a reliable choice.

Another interesting way to visualize the County Business Patterns data is the rank matrix. In this post, we show the highest paying industries for each region since the 1998 – the year when the NAICS was introduced.

In this post we will look at 2013’s PUMS five-year survey data to see if married people have different occupations than divorced people. The survey data we use comes from the American Community Survey, which asks its respondents in detail about various social and economic aspects of their life. PUMS stands for Public Use Microdata Sample and corresponds to a portion of the whole survey that is released to the public. Its five-year release contains data from most localities of the U.S.

Some names have been popular for as long as we can remember (Michael and Emily almost never go out of fashion). Others, as it seems, just come and go.

There are also certain differences between U.S. regions. Jacob was the most popular name in most of the states around 2000. And at the same time, you’re much less likely to meet someone named Jacob in the northeastern states.

Recently, the baby names data on the official Social Security website have been updated with 2014 births. We have found several interesting trends in the data.

There are many unisex names which are suitable for both boys and girls. Dylan, Alexis and Jordan are the most popular examples. Interestingly, as the following chart shows, there’s a definite trend in the popularity of such names: